"Shifting cities" a Xi'an Travel Page by mke1963

Like Alexandria, Baghdad or Rome, Xia'an is a city whose future is bound up inexorably in its past. It anchored the eastern end of the Silk Road, the earliest thread of global trade.
Yet the current city is a relatively modern incarnation of the ancient cities that have occupied this strategic plain where the Wei and Yellow Rivers cut through big mountains. Xi'an has picked up the legacy and the mantle of these earlier, grander cities of Xinyang and the two cities of Chang'an. Of those earlier cities little remains now. Around Xinyang and the Han Chang'an huge, blunted crags and pits of earthen walls and ramparts give only a little clue to the once sumptuous palaces, fortified walls and bustling markets that now echo in the fields of rice and wheat. The second, Sui and Tang, Chang'an was now lies beneath your feet in the concrete and stone of modern-day Xia'an, the history of a million inhabitants in the once grandest city on the planet vanished for ever.
Five hundred years after that Chang'an was dismantled and abandoned, Xi'an grew into a Ming city. Those walls you see now are the smallest of those that have enclosed the people and rulers in this area.
For Xi'an, the Terracotta Warriors are not the most ancient of the Chinese civilisations splendours, but merely one almost recent chapter.
Look further in Xi'an. Look to the north and west for the elusive remains of those ancient cities that gave Xi'an and much of northern China, the chance to be a great civilisation.